The Books Stayed the Same. I Didn't.

 

For years, I have said that books were my best friends. It has taken me much longer to realize that they also raised me.

That may sound strange, but very early in life, I came to feel that the adults around me could not always keep me safe. They could not answer my questions. So, I looked elsewhere for comfort and guidance. I found them in books.

Growing up as a student of Kendriya Vidyalaya, my access to books was limited to the school library. Buying books was simply not an option. Yet those shelves held extraordinary riches. Charles Dickens, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Thomas Hardy, Jane Austen, and Charlotte Brontë became my constant companions. They took me to worlds that felt safer and kinder. These writers, and a whole lot of them had begun shaping the person I would become.

Gradually, reading became more than a hobby—it became an obsession and a refuge. Once I opened a book, the outside world simply disappeared. The day would pass in oblivion, people around me faded and I would not put the book down voluntarily. My mother would often threaten, in frustration, that one day she would throw all my books into the fire if I did not learn to notice anything else around me. One incident from those days still makes me smile. We were living in Madras, now Chennai, and I was sitting outside reading a book of fairy tales. Beside me was another pile of books waiting their turn. I was so completely absorbed in the book that I failed to notice a cow wandering over and calmly beginning to eat the pile next to me. It was only when she stretched her neck towards the book in my hands and tried to pull it away that I looked up. Terrified, I clutched the book and ran. The cow meanwhile was regurgitating and ruminating the literary pieces.

There was another part of reading that I always dreaded—the last few pages. As the story drew to a close, I would begin to feel a quiet sadness. Finishing a book meant saying goodbye to a friend. I knew that when I returned home from school or lay in bed that night, those characters would no longer be waiting for me. Their stories had ended. Long before I understood what grief really was, I think I experienced a small version of it every time I closed the cover of a beloved book.

Among all the books I read, three remained closest to my heart: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, Tess of the d'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy, and Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell. What drew me to them was that each placed a woman at the centre of the story.

My encounter with Gone with the Wind is one I still remember vividly. Before the summer holidays, we were allowed to borrow only two books from the Kendriya Vidyalaya library. Being a voracious and fast reader, I searched for the thickest book I could find so it would last through the vacation. That was how I stumbled upon Gone with the Wind. Ironically, despite its size, I finished it in just two days.

What remained with me, however, was not the speed with which I read but the women I met in those pages. I would not say I identified with them completely, but I admired and empathized with them deeply. I suffered alongside Tess as she endured one humiliation after another. I cried when she shaved off her brows. I understood Scarlett O'Hara's fierce determination to survive because she believed that "tomorrow is another day." And in Jane Eyre, despite all her poverty and loneliness, I found hope that integrity and self-respect could eventually be rewarded.

I reread these novels many times over the years. But growing older has also meant reading them differently. Experience changes the reader.

Looking at these stories today through a feminist lens, I see how harshly and unjustly these women were treated, how much they suffered, and how often their lives were shaped by the choices of men and their circumstances, rather than their own.

Perhaps the greatest change has been in the way I read Jane Eyre. As a child, the character who horrified me was Bertha Mason, Rochester's wife. Today, she evokes my deepest sympathy. She appears to have been a woman suffering from mental illness, hidden away and stripped of her dignity by her husband. What once seemed like a frightening subplot now feels like a heartbreaking injustice. Equally, I find it difficult to understand why Jane waited for Rochester or why the novel ultimately rewards him. As a young reader, I accepted that ending without question. As an adult, I no longer do.

I also find myself questioning Tess of the d'Urbervilles in a way I never did before. Why is it that women like Tess, who suffer repeated indignities at the hands of men, are denied the possibility of a happy life? Why must they die? Today, I believe Tess deserved not tragedy but dignity, justice, and the chance to live fully. My younger self mourned her fate; my older self questions the world—and the literature—that made such an ending seem inevitable.

There is another realization that comes with returning to the books of one's youth. As children, we often read without any reflections. We accept the author's voice as truth, swoon over the heroes without hesitation, and rarely question the values embedded in the story. With age, however, we bring our own experiences into every page. We notice the omissions as much as the words, the characters who were overlooked, and the assumptions that once seemed understood. I have come to understand that rereading is not merely an exercise in nostalgia; it is a conversation between the person I was and the person I have become. Each return to these novels reminds me that while literature preserves, readers continue to evolve. Our changing interpretations are not a rejection of the books we once loved.

Even Gone with the Wind, a novel I once devoured with complete fascination, reads differently now. While I continue to admire Scarlett O'Hara's resilience, I can no longer ignore the way Black people are portrayed in the novel. The romanticized depiction of the Old South and its treatment of Black characters stand in sharp contrast to my present-day belief in equality and human dignity.

That, perhaps, is the greatest gift literature has given me. The books themselves have not changed. Their words are the same. Their endings are the same. But every time I return to them, I discover that I am not the same reader who first opened their pages.

Those books once offered me refuge. Today, they offer me reflection. They no longer simply comfort me; they challenge me, and remind me that growing up is not only about aging in years but about learning to see the world—and the stories we cherish—with new eyes.

The books stayed the same.

I didn't.